AGGADAH or HAGGADAH (Heb. הַגָּדָה, אַגָּדָה; "narrative"), one of the two primary components of rabbinic tradition, the other being halakhah, usually translated as "Jewish Law" (see: Kadushin , The Rabbinic Mind, 59f.). The term aggadah itself is notoriously difficult to define, and it has become the custom among scholars to define aggadah by means of negation – as the non-halakhic component of rabbinic tradition (Fraenkel, Midrash and Aggadah, 20). While fair enough, one must be careful in adopting this approach not to define the parallel term halakhah too narrowly. The halakhah of the rabbinic tradition can be described in part as a system of laws, but not infrequently it also has the character of a personal moral and spiritual discipline. It can be expressed in the form of concrete judgments about specific cases, but also in rules involving varying degrees of abstraction and generality. Talmudic tradition often uses stories to express a halakhah. This is obviously so when the story reports an explicit legal precedent. But it may also be true when a story merely describes the behavior of a notable sage, if it is understood that this behavior is worthy of imitation. Despite the varied forms in which the halakhah is expressed, the rules, judgments and precedents included in talmudic literature all have one thing in common: they all categorize specific forms of behavior and well defined areas of experience in line with formal dichotomies, such as "permissible" or "forbidden," "pure" or "impure," "holy" and "profane," etc. Aggadah, on the other hand, investigates and interprets the meaning, the values, and the ideas which underlie the specific distinctions which govern religious life. In line with the accepted tendency to define aggadah as "that which is not halakhah," one could say that the relation between aggadah and halakhah is similar to the relation between theory and practice, between idea and application, and, in the area of ethics, between character and behavior.